It is now being said that, ‘Behind closed doors, new US leader Donald Trump is thinking about pulling troops out of the South China Seas’
PRESIDENT Donald Trump 2.0, newly minted and bright and shiny, has been showing off his transactional prowess in his first months in office.
His style is to open on major issues with “shock and awe” but with alluring language for his domestic American audience slike “beautiful tariffs” and visioning a “Riviera on the Gaza Strip” but he can quickly buckle down to compromise and achieve – surprisingly looking very Chinese – Win-Win solutions.
Take the Ukraine War end game, at the end of January talking about Ukraine,
Trump dropped outrageously wrong info about Russia claiming 1 million dead Russian soldiers and threatening new sanctions on Russia, but after Feb. 12, 2025 90-minute phone talk with Putin, all that is forgotten and negotiations to start “immediately,” no NATO membership for Ukraine and says Ukraine “unlikely” to get back land lost in the war.
Trump started threatening 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods but finally reduces it to 10 percent as time passed probably leading to the still undisclosed circumstances of a Trump-Xi talks in recent days.
It is the first confirmed talk since Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration to the White House. Finally, the “Riviera on Gaza” seems to be subject to further talks after the audience of the fidgeting King Abdullah of Jordan, consulting with Arab leaders to follow.
What about Asia and the hot spots in the region, Taiwan and the South China Sea which are synonymous to the Philippines’ intransigence in pressing for tensions over its limping EEZ claim against China, Trump is almost completely silent about them recently, except for some noise coming from China-sanctioned US State Secretary Marco Rubio preaching the perfunctory ”commitment to allies” also reaffirming “no support for Taiwan independence.”
On the Philippines, Trump administration’s non-actions speak louder than words.
The absolute disinterest of the US president of its “traditional ally, Philippines” is evident.
Three weeks since his inauguration, the only US activity is a phone talk of the Secretary of State with the Philippine foreign affairs secretary. apparently initiated by the latter, but the various defense and other aid funding having been frozen, have Filipino officials scampering for alternatives.
What is panicking US-Filipino civil society proxies is the Bloomberg report citing John Andrew Byers, a history professor who has been appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, advising the Trump government “to remove the large number of American military forces lurking around China’s coast, and in turn asking Beijing to drop the number of Chinese coast guard vessels in the area…”
Byers has been reputed to be calling for distancing from the “prepare-for-war-with-China attitude” calling for ramping down tensions with China.
In an X post of the Hong Kong journalist and blogger Nury Vittachi says Byers argues “it would be smarter to move away from such a war, even if it could be won.”
He writes the idea of ‘a leader of his time’ removing the US from its warring proclivities has apparently caused the Trump administration to give ear to the peacemongers.
Thus, it is now being said that, “Behind closed doors, new US leader Donald Trump is thinking about pulling troops out of the South China Seas.”
But I have also uncovered another American thinker, a military one at that, whom I found on “War on the Rocks” blog for ”National security” for insiders and wrote “Rolling Back Naval Forward Presence Will Strengthen American Deterrence.”
The commentary is written by Jonathan Panter, Ph.D., is a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an American conservative and governing fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He previously served as a surface warfare officer in the US Navy.
Very pertinent pedigree to comment on the US national security concerns at this crucial, history changing times.
Panter’s arguments are based on the following: the US Navy is “Too Busy, Too Small” when “over one-third of US Navy ships are deployed — the greatest proportion in history,” the “’operational and structural readiness trade-off’… In brief, for three decades, the US Navy traded its structural readiness (for great-power conflict) for operational readiness (to support naval forward presence). It burned through its ships, and debilitated its shipyards…”
Finally, he wrote “’Shipbuilding is Not Enough’… The Trump administration should therefore reevaluate the idea of naval forward presence itself: the notion that America’s Navy is foremost a provider of global goods, and a global policeman, rather than the preeminent warfighting force…”
Think about these my fellow Filipinos.